Daydream Believer: Ten Meets Tapz Gallantino

He’s supercharged by the sun and dressed in a pure white woollen suit from the late Virgil Abloh’s last collection for Louis Vuitton menswear. The artist, musician, producer and model, known as Tapz Gallantino (real name Tapiwa Mutingwende), grew up in Wedza, Zimbabwe, “in a very rural place – the fact that I’m even here right now makes very little sense” before moving with his family to Wellington, New Zealand, at the age of 10. “I’m a walking culture clash, that’s why my art is the way it is,” he says. “We’d listen to a lot of traditional Zimbabwean music, a lot of Bob Marley, too. Some Michael Jackson and Prince, but I never really understood English, I just felt the music. In New Zealand, it was punk rock.” With his debut album All For What set to come out towards the end of the year, Tapz now resides in Los Angeles, where he currently feels most empowered, because “ultimately, I’d rather be Black in America than be Black in New Zealand. At least here I’m not alone.”

Going back to New Zealand during the pandemic, Gallantino found himself at the centre of “petty music industry beef that soon became senseless attacks of gang violence and false accusations,” he says. “I was getting hundreds of death threats. People, including neo-Nazis, were telling me to leave the country. Black people were being beaten up on the streets of Wellington, my parents were being targeted.” Gallantino has written a book, started a brand to empower creatives and conceptualised and finished his debut album. “Everything I’ve been building is around this story but everything I had built up until that point was being assassinated. It was polarising. It didn’t take long for me to understand that everything I’m seeing I’d heard before. This narrative they made up only worked because it fitted in with the ignorance around race in New Zealand, specifically. There, the Black population is less than 1 per cent. I’ve always been vocal about this throughout my career. I put myself in the firing line for it. It makes sense that people would believe false narratives about me because that ‘They’re just immigrants, this is what they do’ mentality is already ingrained in the culture there.”

The album has been a long time coming, as Gallantino has been grinding in the music industry for seven years. In 2016, he was signed to a management deal at Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music label (he now moves independently, finding he has the most control doing it his way). He’s also spent time in the studio with Brent Faiyaz and 6LACK, and toured with Banks in Australia and A$AP Ferg and Lorde in New Zealand. It’s only now that it feels he has fully come into his own with a compassionate understanding of what has been experienced so far on his journey.

His other labour of love is a newly established incubator for independent creatives, Social Crucifixion (also the name of his EP, released last December). Co-founded with his second cousin Kudzai Taziva – first meeting on SoundCloud, the two discovered they were cousins at a family party in New York a few years ago, where Taziva was, by chance, playing Gallantino’s music (he’d been a long-time fan) – the brand’s mission is to empower creatives through offering tools to build an ecosystem that allows them to own, curate and control their narrative, data and identity. “The current infrastructure to distribute and connect with an authentic audience lacks transparency and disproportionately favours legacy media platforms,” he says. Their solution is a set of creator-centric digital services that allow people to understand and monetise their footprint. The duo has begun to consider social media in the same way artists consider owning their music and production masters. “What happens when your masters become your likes, followers and vanity metrics that have nothing to do with your craft?” says Taziva. “Those have become as important as the masters. But they can be taken away from you at any point – and they [your social media followers] can turn against you. Coming from tech, the whole value proposition behind companies like Meta, Microsoft and Google is to attract and extract: attract a following from people who are going to get you a platform and then extract as much value from them as possible and then forget them. It’s a broken model. I think we can help to come up with a better system.” Through Social Crucifixion, the duo hopes to disrupt this system and bring awareness and education to how artists can navigate the current digital landscape. They also hope to soon include an mCommerce avenue of sustainable “designer wear for your digital footprint”.